Asturias

This past weekend featured the long-awaited program trip to Asturias, the northernmost region in Spain and homeland of our program director and professor, Marcos. I call it long-awaited because in every single one of his classes up until this point, Marcos had somehow managed to bring it up in lecture. To describe the land in a single word, Asturias was gorgeous. The five/six hour bus ride from Madrid, I can only compare with the scenery of driving through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado as my family used to frequent when I was younger. No offense intended towards the American mountain ranges, but even this comparison does not begin to do justice to the landscape. The mountains were enormous and dynamic, colored by a plethora of shades of bluish gray, carpets of dainty yellow flowers and trees on trees on trees. It is, I think, the mountain range in which I would picture the old Scandinavian folk stories of trolls and such. What is more, this mountain range is essentially coastal. Talk about a way to make yourself feel small and insignificant in the face of the world at large. We stayed Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights in the city of Oviedo, which our professors had described as bourgeois. While I do to some degree with the use of that adjective, in our night-time excursions of bar-hopping and the general group-style wandering that accompanies a night out with lack of a fixed destination, the parts that weren't particularly high class all carried a unified feeling of punk. Thursday's trip up to Oviedo featured a couple of stops at sea-side shanties and pueblos perched atop cliffs with breathtaking views. The juxtaposition of the farmland, mountainous terrain and sea-breeze struck me as slightly contradictory but at the same time transcendental - or maybe I'm just applying the trains of thought from today's class lecture on surrealism. Friday, though cool in temperature, was definitely the highlight of the trip as we bused about two and a half hours higher into the mountains from our urban stay in Oviedo to the isolated pueblo of Someido to hike and ride mules up the mountainside. Again, the views were incredible and this experience further gave us a chance to see the campesino side of Spain that is so easily lost when one's focus remains on the urban epicenters and major cities. On Saturday, the weather featured what I'm told is a very typical Asturian forecast: about 60 F and rainy, and it was through this weather that we trudged up and down the streets of Oviedo in a walking tour of the cities landmarks and historical features. Of course, as with all of our excursions thus far, the cathedral was the main focus of this paseo, and possibly its most interesting feature (aside from the fact that it offered us warmth and shelter from the elements) is the fact that it is a gothic-styled cathedral but only has one tower instead of two because money fell short in the middle of construction and the city has never bothered to add a second tower. We also braved the rain out into the country-side to see a 9th century chapel, which to be honest would have been a whole lot more interesting if we hadn't been so cold and wet. Sunday, our departure day, we paid a brief visit to the port-town of Gijon to continue to marvel at the sea, as well as learn a bit about the rivalry between Gijon and Oviedo, see las termas romanas (preserved ruins of a Roman bath) among other tourist sites, and grab a group lunch at a sea-side restaurant before heading back to Madrid. To this moment, our experiences with the bus remain fixed in my memory. To be honest, our driver was quite terrible, a fact reinforced by the fact that Marcos would switch from Spanish to English (something he NEVER does for us) to gossip slightly about him. Apparently, we got lost slightly on our way to Oviedo. When heading up to Someido, the driver realized, after about 80% of the trip there had been completed, that our vehicle exceeded the limits for the winding mountain roads and we had to wait about half an hour for cars from Someido to come find and ferry us up about 4-6 at a time. It was quite an adventure, though one that I'm sure my mother wouldn't quite have appreciated, and I find it a miracle that no one found themselves carsick. Within the city of Oviedo, which for the record has wider streets than any of the antiquated cities we've visited thus far, our driver was incapable of making 90 degree turns on the first try. Thank goodness the windows were tinted, because I'm pretty sure that my embarrassment at blocking the entirety of an intersection for about 10 minutes as he tried to turn us around was evident in my facial expressions. To cap things off, on the way back we were pulled over by the police. I have no idea why, as I'd been sitting in the back of the bus playing hours of the game "Contact" in a mix of perfect Spanglish with some of my classmates, but they had us detained on the side of the road for about half an hour. Our trip home ended up taking about 8 hours overall, but at least again, as with every event of this trip, it resulted in a safe and exciting adventure to remember.